Quake-Delayed Event to Honor King Is Held

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

It’s been more than 30 years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the white marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial and spoke those words, hoping they would reach the soul of a nation.

Now they have reached the heart of a community trying to rebuild.

More than a month after they had first planned to come together, about 200 people--white, black, Asian, Latino, Gentile, Jew, Muslim--gathered to celebrate King’s birthday at a ceremony planned by the San Fernando Valley Interfaith Council at Temple Kol Tikvah in Woodland Hills. The ceremony originally was to have been held Jan. 17, the day of the Northridge earthquake.

Now, as residents begin to rebuild, the unity of which King spoke is more important than ever, organizers said.

“We’re looking at this as a time to celebrate healing and the uniting of different people in the Valley,” said council spokeswoman Arlene C. Landon.

“Jan. 17 I wanted to welcome you as brothers and sisters in joy, and in just six weeks our lives changed drastically. Martin spoke to us that morning and he speaks to us again tonight,” said Rabbi Steven B. Jacobs of congregation Kol Tikvah.

“The magnitude of the earthquake we can withstand, but not the magnitude of violence in Los Angeles.

“I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice . . . will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

“It was Martin who said the choice is no longer between nonviolence and violence, but nonviolence and nonexistence,” Jacobs said.

The choice still must be made, said the Rev. Zedar Broadous, president of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the NAACP. “We must begin to re-embrace each other. If we don’t work together, those who seek to destroy us will,” he said.

When King wrote his famed letter from a Birmingham jail, he wrote not of the Klu Klux Klan or of violent segregationists, but said instead the problem he faced was moderate whites “more devoted to order than justice.”

“It’s time we begin to suffer a little more for what we believe--as King did,” said the Rev. Timothy Safford, of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, who read from the Birmingham letter.

“It’s time to choose justice and turn our back on violence,” he added.

Rabbi Jerrold Goldstein, who traveled to Florida with 15 other rabbis in 1964 at King’s request, said he remembered that King “guided and sustained and strengthened us in a way we could not have managed on our own. His spirit surely lives on in this room.

“It wasn’t easy to know what to do when he was alive--it’s harder now,” he said. Reginald Gillens, of the Church of the Way in Van Nuys, read from King’s speech in a big voice:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”